Don Cayo: On substance, Trudeau has surpassed his father

Justin “gets” the West in a way his father never did

Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau pauses as he speaks to the Vancouver Board of Trade in Vancouver on Friday, April 11, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

Photograph by: Jonatan Hayward
, THE CANADIAN PRESS

Forty-six years ago, I covered a speech in Nelson by a prime-ministerial wannabe named Trudeau who went on to win the job and hold it for a long, long time.

Friday, I covered a speech in Vancouver by a prime-ministerial wannabe named Trudeau who may or may not win the job next year.

How do the two, Pierre and Justin, pere et fils, stack up against each other?

On style, there’s no question that Justin learned a lot about easy confidence at the microphone from his masterful Old Man. But when it comes to transforming this charm into magnetism, Trudeau the Younger still has a long way to go.

Friday’s audience, a thousand-plus Vancouver Board of Trade members, certainly seemed attentive and quite warmly interested. But the 1968 audience in Nelson seemed, as I recall through the fog of too many decades passed, electrified and wildly enthusiastic.

Some of this may be the audience — hippie-heavy Nelson versus the staid Board of Trade. Or perhaps it’s just that these are more sober times. But some of it is the mysterious chemistry of charisma, and Friday’s, though good, fell short of great.

On substance, however, I thought the son surpassed his father.

Pierre Trudeau’s great strength — the fuel that fired Trudeaumania in his first campaign — was passion for Canada. This carried into his time in office and yielded not only the tangible nation-building exercise of a patriated constitution capped with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but also a generally greater and more confident sense of nationhood than most Canadians had felt before.

But the economy? Not so much. In the 1968 campaign, my memory is that Trudeau treated strong future growth as pretty much a given — and so did most voters. This view also carried into his time in office when he, at best, neglected important aspects of economic management and at worst, screwed it up.

Trudeau the Younger seems determined to honour and to build on the passion of his dad. His audience was business-oriented and his theme was economic growth, but a thread woven through from start to finish was the need to build not just a stronger economy, but also a better country. Better distribution of the wealth that flows from growth, balancing resource development with environmental stewardship — these aren’t new themes for the young Liberal leader, but they were key ones he discussed at length and returned to time and again.

Nor was he particularly vague — indeed less vague than most politicians including, on many occasions, his father — on specific issues. He forthrightly supports the Harper Conservatives for free trade deals with Europe and Korea. He’s for the Keystone pipeline because, he said, it has gone through a credible review process. He’s against the Northern Gateway proposal as it stands because, he said, it failed to win buy-in from the communities and interests involved. He’s content to wait for the Kinder Morgan pipeline approval process to play out and see where it leads.

Even more interestingly to me, his discussion of these issues and more was centred in a Western context with frequent and fluent references to B.C. You might think this unremarkable — after all, he’s a UBC education grad who launched his previous teaching career here.

But this is what, for me, differentiated the Trudeaus most sharply — that the new one “gets” the West in a way the old one never did.

If memory serves, Trudeau the Elder didn’t even make a pretext of grasping local issues when a few of us local reporters put a few questions to him in Nelson way back when. And that wasn’t just a one-off on a bad day — it became his trademark. Indeed, a dozen years later, his hated National Energy Policy — a total misreading of what Western voters would tolerate — actually began to fan separatism flames in much of Alberta and parts of B.C. Before long, Trudeau himself had morphed into the most despised prime minister most of us can remember — at least until Brian Mulroney came along.

You can expect endless debate between now and next year’s election about whether the new Trudeau’s economic pronouncements are the right ones, or whether he has the right stuff to follow through. But don’t expect him to fall into the Western alienation trap that so wounded his father.

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